About Us

Greater Alarm Fire Gear is a small and growing company that began out of the overwhelming requests for the gear we were making for our own use in our own fire department.

You see we, the owners of this company, are simply an engine company who decided that the equipment we use in the most hostile environments imaginable should be designed by the people who use them.

We, like you, have been frustrated with the lack of innovation and targeted, purposeful design that seems to be missing from many of the tools and equipment we are expected to use on the fire ground.

So we began our company not with the idea of making and marketing products, but simply to make better tools for our own use on the fire ground. This we accomplished with our first effort, a durable, flexible, lightweight high-rise pack that worked perfectly. In the design process we decided we would not stop until it met every need we wanted it to. So after many prototypes and extensive testing we were really proud of the result. Our Fire Department immediately gave us the go-ahead to outfit all of our apparatus with the units and begin the “trial by fire” so to speak. It is now two years later and the packs have been employed on countless emergency scenes and training exercises including regional high-rise training.

Over this time the packs performed so well that we were literally inundated with requests from other agencies to know where we got them. Up until now we had to tell them that they were not available anywhere at any price because we made them ourselves. At that time we were approached by a distributor who urged us to patent and produce this quality tool for the market.

We decided to move forward with the following focus: “If we in the fire service are going to expect our people to march to the top of a high-rise building and fight whatever hell they find there, then manufacturers must at least make their products function perfectly, ergonomically meet the needs of that environment, be as lightweight as possible, and be at least as tough as the men and women who use them.”

If more manufacturers conformed to this standard then the technology gap between the fire department and virtually every other field would not be so great. The “Hose Handler” high-rise pack is now a reality and available to all firefighters everywhere. I hope you enjoy its functionality as much as I do.

We at Greater Alarm are going to continue to bring new products that are designed by and for the people that have to use them on the fire ground. We already have several innovative new tools in the testing phase so keep your eyes open for future releases. Ours is a proud profession and we here at Greater Alarm are determined to honor that commitment by making products worthy of your dedication.

-- Capt. Tim O’Brien, Inventor/user